Six Editing and Delivery Mistakes That Cost a Bulletin Its Slot

The commonest mistake I see in the edit is starting to cut before anyone has agreed what the clip is for. A producer sends footage with the words 'make it work', and the editor builds a first assembly that suits nobody. Ten minutes spent settling the angle, the running time and the slot it must fill saves an hour of re-cutting later.

On a developing story the pressure to move straight to the timeline is strong, and it is exactly when a short written brief pays off. One line on the point of the piece, one on the length, one on where it will run. Our editors ask for those three lines before touching a clip, and they ask again if the story has moved since the footage was shot.

It also helps to say what can be dropped. If the interview is the heart of the piece, the editor will protect it and trim the cutaways. If the pictures carry the story, the reverse applies. Left unsaid, both get diluted and the clip drifts past its slot.

• Agree the angle in one sentence
• Fix the running time before the first cut
• Name the slot: bulletin, web or both
• Say which material can be sacrificed

Captioning is routinely left to the last ten minutes, and it shows. Names are misspelt, lines run off the safe area, and timing drifts a beat behind the speaker. Viewers watching online with the sound off meet the captions first, so errors there are the first thing anyone notices about the whole piece.

We check every name and job title against what the producer supplied, not against what the editor heard. Where the spelling is uncertain we ask, because a wrong name on screen is harder to fix once the clip is out than a few minutes' delay beforehand. Line length is kept short enough to read at a glance.

Timing matters as much as spelling. A caption that appears before the speaker finishes the previous thought confuses the viewer, and one that lingers after the cut looks careless. Priya, our senior editor, reads each caption track through once with the sound muted, which catches most problems in a single pass.

• Verify names and titles against the producer's list
• Keep lines short and inside the safe area
• Read the caption track once with the sound off

A clip that looks right on the editor's screen can still be refused by the playout system. Frame rate, resolution, audio layout and file wrapper all differ between a television gallery and an online channel, and finding that out at the point of delivery is a mistake that costs minutes nobody has.

The remedy is dull but reliable: ask for the delivery specification at the start, not the end. If a client does not have one to hand, we confirm the basics in writing, such as the frame rate, the loudness target and whether captions are burned in or supplied as a separate file, and we keep that note with the project.

Where one story must go to both broadcast and web, we plan two outputs from the same cut rather than converting one into the other in a hurry. Vertical or square crops for online need their own framing decisions, because simply shrinking a wide shot often puts the subject off centre.

Picture gets the attention and sound gets the blame. A beautifully cut clip with a jump in level between interview and voiceover will be sent back, and it is a quick fix only if the original recordings were sound. Checking audio early, while there is still time to ask for a better file, is far cheaper than trying to rescue it at the end.

We listen through headphones on the first pass and note anything that needs attention: wind on location, a hum from lighting, a presenter's mic that clipped. Daniel's crews are good at capturing clean sound, but even good recordings vary between takes, and the editor's job is to even them out without making the speech sound processed.

Loudness should be measured against the target for the channel, not judged by ear alone. Ears tire after a long day, and a clip that sounded fine at five can be noticeably loud against the bulletin around it.

• Listen on headphones during the first assembly
• Flag wind, hum and clipped takes early
• Measure loudness against the channel target

Exporting is not the end of the job. The most embarrassing errors, a flash frame at the join, a caption left from an earlier version, a clip exported at the wrong length, are caught only by watching the finished file from start to finish. Not the project on the timeline, the actual file that will be sent.

We watch every export in full before it leaves, and a second person looks at anything going to broadcast. It takes a few minutes and has stopped more problems than any other habit in our suite.

The handover note matters too. A short message saying what the file is, its running time, its format, which version it replaces and who to call if there is a problem means the receiving desk does not have to guess. Under deadline, clear labelling is as valuable as a clean cut.

On a live story the clip changes several times: a new line from a spokesperson, a corrected figure, a shorter version for the late bulletin. Files named 'final', 'final2' and 'final_new' are how the wrong version gets aired. It sounds trivial, and it is the mistake most likely to cause real harm to a newsroom's credibility.

Our approach is plain naming with a version number and a time, and a single place where the current approved file lives. Older versions are kept but moved aside, so nobody can pick one up by accident. When a correction is needed, we change the cut, not just the caption, and note what was altered.

Fair reporting depends on this discipline. If a statement has been updated or withdrawn, the clip that carries it must be replaced everywhere it was delivered, and the editor needs to know which desks received which version to make that happen.

• Name files with version number and time
• Keep one approved file in one place
• Log which desks received which version